Charles Dickens' Hard Times is a novel with a social message which the author brings to life through character and setting. Dickens was a social reformer who was particularly concerned about the plight of the poor, prison conditions, and the changes taking place in working conditions in his time. The Industrial Revolution had altered Britain and altered the relationship between workers and their work. The town depicted by Dickens, Coketown, is a representation of the sort of world that was coming into being because the Industrial Revolution centered entirely on promoting the economy through increased profits while ignoring the human element that makes the whole thing operate. Coketown is an example of what results when society ignores the consequences of change--it is a dark and dirty place where ignorance prevails and any human happiness is stamped out by the sheer sameness of the surroundings. Dickens is not calling in this novel for the elimination of industry but for cleaning it up so that Coketown would be a very different sort of place.
Dickens uses the setting of Coketown as an ever-present background for the action, and always the characters are seen as affected by living in this milieu. Dickens describes the region: "It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage" (17-18). The use of the word "savage" shows that Dickens sees places like Coketown as throwbacks to a less civilized age. The description also speaks to our own age and shows that Dickens found in the industrialized city problems we encounter today, problems with pollution and dehumanization. Coketown is a "town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purpl...